This Saturday June 21st, collect samples from bodies of water to catalog the ocean’s microbial biodiversity.

This Saturday June 21st, citizen scientists will be able to take part in MyOSD(official site) the citizen science component to this year’s Ocean Sampling Day (OSD). The event is organized by Micro B3 (Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics and Biotechnology) a European cross-disciplinary multi-institute collaborative aimed at developing large-scale research efforts to forward marine biodiversity research. On OSD, scientists around the world will collect water samples in an effort to catalog the ocean’s microbial biodiversity. On the same day, citizen scientists will gather environmental and contextual data. Organizers say that this ‘snap shot’ of the Earth’s waters might be the ‘biggest data set in marine research that has been taken on one single day.’[1]

Scientists are interested in marine microbes because of the role they played and continue to play in shaping our global environment. Microbes were critical to the evolution of life on the Earth. “Microbes were the first organisms evolving on Earth. When microbes developed the ability to photosynthesize, they began producing oxygen. This transformed the Earth’s early environment, making it hospitable to life,” explains Julia Schnetzer a graduate student at the Jacobs University and Max Planck Institute and the MyOSD coordinator.

“Today, marine microbes still produce more than fifty percent of the oxygen we need to breathe and consume fifty percent of the world’s carbon dioxide. In addition they are involved in key biological processes in the ocean system such as nitrogen fixation and the carbon pump.” Nitrogen fixation increases the availability of biologically accessible nitrogen by transforming atmospheric nitrogen into ammonium. The ocean’s carbon pump is a biological cycle which removes atmospheric carbon and sequesters it into organic materials deep inside the ocean. Several gigatons of atmospheric carbon are cycled into the oceans each year.[2] “Their participation in these processes make microbes critical in shaping the climate of the planet and thus are essential to the health of our environment.”

OSD will help scientists understand microbe biodiversity and how microbes affect the environment. On the 21st of June, teams of scientists will take water samples at various locations and identify microbial content via DNA sequencing. Marine microbes are particularly challenging to raise in culture, which has hindered their study in the laboratory. However advances in high through-put DNA sequencing technology have made it more practical and cost effective to study marine microbes directly from their natural habitat. In addition to analyzing microbe content, scientists will be taking environmental and contextual data such as water salinity, mineral content, air and water temperature.

There are 168 sampling locations.

“The results from OSD will produce two sets of data especially useful for marine scientists. The data about microbial biodiversity will help us understand which species are present and what they are doing. The environmental parameters will give us an idea on how the microbes influence their environment and how the environment influences them,” says Schnetzer. All the collected data will go into a publicly available open source repository. Researchers and citizens can visit the OSD map to see the locations and the genomic, environmental, and contextual data from the sampled sites. The website provides a helpful tutorial on farming the data.

More areas sampled mean better resolution of our ocean’s picture. OSD organizers need citizen scientists to help fill in the gaps. If you live near a body of water, you can help collect environmental information such as location, time, and temperature. Even if it is just a small nearby stream, OSD organizers still want your data. If you own water sampling devices, or are willing to build your own like a simple Secchi Disk, you will be able to provide additional useful information such as water pH or transparency. Download the free OSD app (Android and iPhone compatible) to make submitting your measurements easier. Don’t have a phone? Just save the data and submit it later online. Find out details about contributing to the project, data gathering instructions and analysis kits here.

Organizers hope that by engaging citizen scientists it will provide a better understanding of the value of our oceans and the need to protect them. “The more citizen scientists support there is for MyOSD the better the event will become and the more emphasis can be placed on the importance of education and outreach in marine science in future OSDs,” says Schnetzer.

Dr. Carolyn Graybeal holds a PhD in neuroscience from Brown University. She is a former National Academies of Science Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Fellow during which time she worked with the Marian Koshland Science Museum. In addition the intricacies of the human brain, she is interested in the influence of education and mass media in society’s understanding of science.

Calling all water monitoring groups! It is time for the annual Secchi Dip-In. From now until July 22, volunteer and professional water monitoring groups are being asked to take transparency measurements in a local body of water.

A secchi disk is a common tool for measuring water turbidity, or water cloudiness. Turbidity is caused by small particles suspended in the water and is a reflection of water quality. To take turbidity measurements, on a calm and bright day the user lowers the disk into the water until the disk is no longer visible. The depth of the disk is used to calculate turbidity. Land erosion from construction or mining, pollution run-off or increases in algae all lead to higher turbidity.

Started in 1994 at Kent State University, Ohio, the Dip-In always takes place during the first few weeks of July. Participants only have to take one transparency per body of water with their secchi disk. The project helpfully provides links for purchasing disks if you do not already have one.

While project organizers prefer that measurements are taken during the “official” dip-in period, participants are welcome to add data from anytime of the year as well as past years. Currently over 2,000 water bodies are being tracked, most of which are in North America. The data are accessible to anybody interested.

In addition to transparency measurements, participants are asked to give their general impressions of the water quality as well as the area’s general aesthetics and recreational properties. These qualitative data help project researchers ascertain the potential sources affecting water quality.

Dr. Carolyn Graybeal earned her PhD in neuroscience from Brown University in partnership with the National Institutes of Health. After graduating, she became a Christian Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Fellow with the National Academies of Science where she had the opportunity to immerse herself in the policy side of science. In addition the human brain, she is interested in the influence of education and mass media in society’s understanding of science. Originally from California, she is learning to identify the four seasons of the East Coast and is getting pretty good at it.

On June 1, 2011 at 11:51 PM, a group of people assembled on the beach in Northpoint, New York. There was no moon shining that night, not even a sliver. The people carried flashlights or wore headlamps. They held clipboards and paper.

Their mission: to report where horseshoe crabs were spotted along the beach.

This was just one of several places along New York’s shoreline where people collect data about horseshoe crabs. Volunteers also amassed on dark beaches in Stony Brook, Staten Island, Brooklyn and Westhampton. In all, volunteers monitored the comings and goings of horseshoe crabs at ten New York beaches that night.

They are a part of the New York Horseshoe Crab Monitoring Network, a group of citizen scientists who are documenting where horseshoe crabs emerge from the water to lay eggs along beaches in New York State. On specific dates through the spring and early summer, participants collect data about the number of horseshoe crabs and identify their size and sex. They attach tags to the horseshoe crabs bulky exoskeleton and look for tags from prior years.

Marine biologists will use your photographs to identify whale sharks and keep a record of interactions with individual sharks. Similar to how images of fingerprints can identify specific humans, photographs of whale sharks’ skin patterning, gills, and scars, combined with state-of-the-art pattern-recognition algorithms, allow scientists recognize specific sharks across multiple encounters.

Jellyfish, in addition to being one of many ocean creatures that terrify me, are an important part of the underwater ecosystem. However, several reports have indicated an unusually high increase in Jellyfish populations, and scientists are in need of help to understand why.

Enter JellyWatch, a new citizen science project that aims to create a database of jellyfish sightings across the globe. Have you seen a Jellyfish on a family vacation or on your yearly deep-sea fishing trip? Snap a picture if you can, and visit JellyWatch to record your sighting.

If you went to the beach but didn’t see any jellyfish, that data can be used as well. And, the study is looking at more than just jellyfish — sightings of red tide, squid, or other unusual marine life will help build a long-term database that can be accessed and further developed by schools, policy makers, and the general public.

Curious how it works? Visit the list of sightings and see what other people have contributed.

With summer approaching, you should have plenty of opportunities to go JellyWatching. If you end up contributing to JellyWatch, let us know about your experiences by posting on your very own Science for Citizens Member Blog. We’d love to know how it went.